


The A-Team

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Number The Stars [2]
Category: Numb3rs, Thoughtcrimes (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 17:09:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6292765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: Thoughtcrimes/any, Freya McAllister, she's the new one on the team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The A-Team

Freya didn't like this new team thing. She'd been part of a good team. Granted, her team had been her-and-Brendan, and it mostly involved him wielding his gun and his uncanny memory skills alongside her telepathy, and they'd kicked ass and taken a lot of names. She was pretty proud of Team Freya-and-Brendan. So naturally the NSA had to break them up. They shipped Brendan off to Afganistan for some kind of deep cover thing she wasn't allowed to know about (sort of; the last she'd glimpsed of Brendan as they'd hustled him out the door was him protesting that they couldn't force him to get a regulation haircut but he did look pretty fine in the right kind of uniform; obviously his new gig was something military-related).  
  
They shipped Freya off to LA where she was supposed to go into deep cover. It was a simple assignment. Her only real objective was to...blend in. Not use her telepathy unless specifically instructed. To be as normal and undetectable as possible. The function of her assignment was two-fold: give her some deep-cover experience, and get her properly educated.  
  
So she was a grad student in the math department at Cal Tech. (That lie she'd told June about her being a math savant? Not entirely a lie, as it turned out.) Using telepathy to get the answers from the professor was dishonest and would have mooted her entire education to boot, so she shut her telepathy down, and she worked hard. Her new professional team consisted of a handler posing as her mother, her handler's real husband, and another female NSA agent who posed as her sister. They were a friendly enough bunch, but because she was a grad student and supposedly independent she didn't have to live with them, but she did check in with them regularly (they were her family, it wasn't that weird).  
  
No, her true team was supposed to be her fellow grad students. But she didn't quite fit in with them. Most of them had spent the majority of their lives in the hallowed halls of academia. Their experience with the real world was mostly theoretical, either through their love of TTRPGs or MMORPGs or books or television while they spent their days buried in books or pacing in front of chalkboards and slowly getting covered in chalk dust.  
  
Her team somehow ended up being a physics professor named Larry who hung around her thesis advisor, Charlie, and Charlie himself.  
  
Charlie was ridiculously cute, with his dark curls and his bright dark eyes and the way he could get lost in numbers in an instant. He tended to put on massive headphones and shut the world out with music while he was working on a new theory, and Freya had learned the simple pleasure of sneaking up on him and watching him jump out of his skin when he realized she was there. (She'd also learned the fine art of whether or not it was a good idea to sneak up on him.)  
  
When she wasn't in lectures or teaching classes or back at her apartment poring over math, she was running around with Charlie and Larry, helping Charlie with his mad experiments or helping Larry try to corral Charlie into being more focused on his work and his life (Charlie was the epitome of the absent-minded scientist and had a tendency to forget things that involved people and remember anything that involved math). Between listening to Charlie's enthusiasm as he described a mathematical principle, trailing behind him and carrying his lecture materials as he hurried from place to place, or waiting at the finish line of his supergravity car demonstration, she somehow became part of Charlie-Larry-Amita (and peripherally part of Charlie-Don-Amita and Charlie-Dad-Amita), and she felt awful, because she was lying to him, but it was also okay. 

Because Charlie reminded her a little bit of Brendan. She'd never read his mind, but she could see the way his eyes lit up when he'd hit on a new theory – that was the same way Brendan lit up when he made a breakthrough on a case. And when Charlie started working with Don on a case, Freya couldn't help but follow along and help, because that was what she was made to do, born to do, to help people by catching those who made them suffer. But she didn't dare reach out to the minds around her. This was a test for her as much as for the FBI. She had to keep it under control.

So she made sure no one erased the whiteboards Charlie was working on, and she teased Charlie's dad when he threatened to flirt with her, and she hoped Brendan was okay wherever he was (she hadn't managed to hack into the NSA's surveillance feed on him yet to check on him but she was pretty sure she was close). Most of all, she hoped she could make it with this team, help as much and for as long as she could. (And maybe, one day, both of her teams could become one team.)


End file.
